There’s a potential candidate in the Penn State coaching search that not a lot of people are talking about.
To be clear, Nittany Sports Now can’t confirm that Penn State is interested in Vanderbilt coach Clark Lea or that Lea is interested in Penn State.
With that said, it’s hard to argue that he isn’t somebody worth considering.
While fans have kicked around names like Curt Cignetti (before his extension), Matt Rhule and Eli Drinkwitz, Clark Lea has been leading Vanderbilt to its best season in history.
The biggest win of that season happened Saturday afternoon, when Vandy, ranked No. 17, beat No. 10 LSU in Nashville. The crazy thing is we can’t even call it an upset because Vanderbilt was favored to beat LSU.
In football. With LSU ranked in the top 10.
This speaks to the job Lea has done. It also speaks to his ability to do what James Franklin so often failed to at Penn State— win big games.
Franklin was 4-21 against Top 10 teams and 1-15 against top five teams. Lea already has the same amount of top five wins, beating No. 1 Alabama last season. Franklin never beat a ranked team in his time at Vandy.
When Lea got to Vanderbilt, the program was the laughing stock of the SEC.
That reputation stayed through Lea’s first three seasons, with two of them being 2-10 campaigns.
Things began to shft last year, with Vandy going 7-6 for its first winning season since Franklins last season (2013).
As silly as it might seem, the fact that Lea came from Vanderbilt would be a drawback for some people solely because that’s where Franklin came from. What’s less silly to talk about is that it would be hard to see Lea leaving his alma mater, which is also something that could get in the way of Penn State hiring Louisville’s Jeff Brohm.
